TIP: How to find total number of unique objects among many instances
Yes, there are two ways to do this! Blender refers to the number of unique objects as &quot;Meshes&quot;, so you can find the number of unique meshes present in your scene within the Outliner panel. The first way is to set the Outliner to &quot;Blender File&quot; (highlighted in cyan color below). The number of unique Mesh IDs is shown as a tiny number beside the Meshes symbol. This is the total number of non-instanced meshes in your scene. On the other hand, the total number of objects (including instanced meshes) is shown as a tiny number beside the Objects symbol. In the sample image below, there are only 2 unique meshes in the scene, but a total of 4 objects, since the cube is instanced 3 times. This question had puzzled me until now, I hope the info helps someone else too. :-)
EDIT: Unfortunately, if you have more than 99 objects in your scene, the tiny number will only say &quot;+99&quot;, so it's still not terribly useful to determine the total number of objects in your scene. In this case, you should switch the Outliner to &quot;Data API&quot; mode (shown in cyan color below). From here, you can see a numerical value for the total number of unique meshes even if it exceeds 99.